


Grandeur in this View of Life

by narie



Series: The Entangled Bank [1]
Category: Glee
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-25
Updated: 2011-08-25
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narie/pseuds/narie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Santana reaches out, but forgets to tell Kurt about it. Written post-Sexy, probably no longer canon-compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grandeur in this View of Life

The first text message reads, "shut berry up", and Kurt assumes it has been sent to him in error, so he does not reply. The second comes late at night - he only sees it the following morning - and says "i h8 indigo girls" and this time Kurt thinks she must be drunk, and misdialling again. He ignores that one too. But then there's a facebook message, and another text ("hummel stop ignoring me"), and he can no longer tell himself they're accidental. He just has no idea what they are about.

"Sorry what can i do for you?" he sends back, a bit testy, and receives no reply. He writes it all off and forgets about it - doesn't mention it to Blaine, doesn't even ask Finn if there's any sort of context - until he's early at the Lima Bean one afternoon, prim and proper, posture immaculate but somehow still casual, reading at the table he secretly likes to thinks of as belonging to him and Blaine.

A shadow falls across his book, and he looks up, feeling his mouth curve into that fond smile he cannot control whenever the other boy is around, even though lately he has taken to really wishing he could. "Your lumbering hulk of a brother let it slip you loiter here when you're not in gay school, and I needed some coffee," Santana Lopez says instead. She holds out her hand expectantly, palm upward, open, and Kurt stares dumbfounded until she side-eyes him and adds, voice cloying and sultry, "aren't you going to buy a lady a drink?"

He rolls his eyes right back at her, but reaches into his bag for his wallet all the same, offers a $5 bill and watches as she sashays her way to the counter. "My change, please," he says when she glides, drink in hand, back into the chair across from him. She drops less coins than she should onto the table, brings her cup to her mouth and drinks, licking her lips afterwards, never breaking eye contact with him.

Kurt blushes, and she laughs. "Relax, Hummel," she says, for once refraining from rolling his last name around her mouth so it sounds like 'homo.' "I just want to talk," but that only serves to make him more uncomfortable. He sighs, marking his place on his book, and putting it down on the table.

"So I hear you're in love with the short preppy boy, the one Rachel was getting her mack on with at her party?"

"What's it to you?" he asks right back, feeling the last vestiges of ease flow from him as he stiffens reflexively.

She continues, undeterred. "You gotten any yet?"

Kurt arches an eyebrow at her, crosses his arms, and she rolls her eyes at him while she lets her head tip back and takes another drink from her coffee, neck bare. From where he's sitting Kurt can see at least three men staring at her, succeeding to different degrees in keeping the lust out of their expressions. He has no doubt that she's sharply aware of the way their gazes converge on her. She shrugs. "You should."

"He's not interested," he snaps, disdainful and hurt, and hopefully with enough finality that she will drop the topic.

"Bullshit," she says. "He totally wants you, I saw it at Sectionals."

"Santana," Kurt warns again. Below the table he crosses his legs, tight, right thigh over the left, right ankle tucked back around, knees tense. Above the table his right hand closes around his own drink, and he is very proud of his self-control.

"I'm just sayin' it like it is. Unless Berry made him straight, which, seriously, gross."

"Did you want to talk to me, or just take my money and insult me?"

She stares at him, expression closer to shrewd than judgemental. "Love sucks," she says eventually. "See you at Regionals, Kurt" and then she's gone, and Kurt still has no idea what any of that was about, mostly stuck as he is on the fact that for the first time he can recall she has called him by his first name and not felt the need to toss any jokes after it. He remains lost in thought until Blaine arrives and asks why he's got two half-finished drinks.

"Santana made me buy her one," he explains.

"Santana?"

Kurt is about to describe the clothes she wore to Rachel's party, but he is struck by the thought that that will probably not help Blaine's confusion at all. Instead he settles for "New Directions' man eater, I've told you about her."

"Ah, yes," Blaine nods sagely.

"She did the big solo in Sectionals, also."

"I remember her. Great voice," he adds, because Blaine is apparently incapable of being anything other than nice to people. "Very sexy."

Kurt smiles, tight, and thinks of pamphlets shoved hastily into the last drawer of his bedside table, the ones he still looks at like they're something forbidden.

-

Two days later - three days before Regionals - Kurt is pulling into the driveway when Santana uncurls from the Hummel-Hudson's front steps and saunters to his car. He rolls down the passenger side window and is about to kill the engine when she orders "take me to the 'Stix." Without waiting for his response she opens the door and steps into the car, fastening her seat belt. "I meant today."

When he still doesn't move, she snaps her fingers at him. "I'll have you home in time for dinner," she sighs condescendingly. There's an undercurrent of need to all her movements, something he has never seen in her before, and that's why he acquiesces, shifting the Navigator into reverse and pulling out. She fiddles with the radio, skipping stations. With the first snatch of song Kurt bristles, with the second he's convinced she's doing it just to irritate him but by the fifth he begins to worry. He raises an eyebrow at her in the rear-view mirror when she jumps from Top 40 to Christian rock, and she matches his expression, but does not stop until he's turning the key at the mall parking lot.

He doesn't miss the way she scans the room when they enter, which he is not going to pretend he isn't offended by - if she wants a free meal from him, then she could at least act like she wants to be around him.

When they're finally seated at one of the booths near the back she leans forward, head resting on her hands, chest jutting forward purposefully. "How is your gay school?" she asks. There is no one else from McKinley around, which seems to have relaxed her, and if he is being honest, is probably for the best for both of them, and their respective reputations.

"It's nice," he says. "I don't know if the uniform is better or worse than the Cheerios one. At least it's not polyester, but those blazers are frightfully cut."

She swats one hand at him, a clear motion demanding that he get to the point. "And the people?"

"They're great. It's nice to be accepted," he concedes after a beat, that fond smile creeping into his face again. He tries to fight it again. "Why do you care, anyhow?"

She reaches for a bread stick, snaps it in half, shoving it into her mouth undignifiedly, in a blatantly calculated attempt to buy herself time. "You get your gay on with Frodo yet?" she asks when she's done munching.

"He doesn't want me," he tells her, terse like in the coffee shop. "Stop asking."

"Sex," she says instead, "sex is easy. And it feels good." She pitches her voice somewhere between obvious and conspiratorial, and it strikes Kurt that for some reason or another Santana is trying to give him advice, even if all that Kurt really hear is her silent, unaware judgement of him, her reprove if she were to know the truth about him. He raises his gaze, carefully constructed to deflect her words, only find that her eyes are shining and moist; twenty different acerbic comebacks die inchoate in his mouth and suddenly Kurt has no firm idea of what this conversation is actually about. Suspicion is beginning to awaken and pool awkwardly at the base of his spine, and his stomach, like it was doing in the car.

"Santana," he asks, "are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she says, which Kurt knows better than to just take at face value, but which he lets slide anyhow. She snaps another bread stick, and their non-conversation sets the tone for the rest of the hour. She quizzes him about snippets of his life while he watches her eat her way through a serving of spaghetti and meatballs, morosely pushing the food around back and forth. He sips a diet soda, answers her desultorily and thinks, not without trepidation, that if he ever goes on a real date with someone it will not be as awkward as this, and not just because the person across from him will be male. She doesn't order dessert.

Outside in the parking lot he offers, "do you want a ride somewhere?"

"I'm fine, Kurt. Thanks for the company." she tosses over her shoulder as she begins walking away.

Only when he gets home does he realise that she never asked him to pay for her meal.

-

She pulls him aside at Regionals, during Aural Intensity's performance. "Still a virgin?"

Kurt doesn't answer; he keeps his chin high and his spine straight. She sighs at him, shaking her head and pursing her lips, like his inability to become... intimate with Blaine is a personal affront to her and all of her conquests. "Well, Hummel, if you want it you gotta make a move. It's how these things work."

"Well, Lopez," Kurt snaps, because he is so tired of having this conversation with her, "I tried. But I'm not _sexy_ enough for him. So just _drop it_ , alright?" It's a piece of information he would have baulked at sharing with anyone just a couple of weeks ago, but ever since Blaine flat-out confirmed that Kurt is as alluring as a baby animal, he's been feeling vindictive, and surly, and what does it matter if Santana Lopez knows this? It's not like the entire student body at McKinley hasn't already mentally condemned him to a life of repressed celibacy and loneliness. He doesn't think this confession is even worthy of being fodder for the rumour mill.

But instead she is eyeing him the way he sometimes would catch her staring at Brittany across the choir room, back then - it's a look he remarked upon because it was bereft of all of her customary malice. "You are _so_ not my type," she disclaims, "and it's partly because you're obviously stupid, but Coach Sylvester didn't give you that solo just because your voice would've got you sent to live with circus freaks a hundred years ago."

"Thanks," he replies dryly. "Can we stop talking about this now?"

"Kurt," she insists, "Brittany still thinks you're hot."

Kurt shrugs. "Brittany thinks anything that's warm is hot." It's a bit mean, but it's the truth.

"Not really," Santana says, too quick and sudden. There is something hidden there but Kurt doesn't really want to unpack the convoluted mess that is Santana and Brittany's strange co-dependent friendship; he is too tired and his life too complicated. Thankfully before he has to Blaine arrives to save him, Kurt's valiant knight-errant, pulling him back towards the front of house, into the row of seats reserved for the Warblers.

-

He finds her in the girls' bathrooms on his first day back at McKinley. Her eyes are red-rimmed as she scrubs at her face frantically when Kurt ducks inside, not because he's a coward, but because he's wasn't paying attention to the sign on the door.

Something makes him awkwardly ask, "is this about Puckerman?" instead of walking right back out, when their stares meet in the mirror. Kurt has seen more surprising things in his life that Puck and Lauren Zizes all cosied up, first at Regionals and just now in the choir room, but it has been a while, and he remembers how Santana reacted when Puck started paying attention to Mercedes, last year.

"No," she laughs bitterly. "Zizes can keep him."

"Sam?" ventures Kurt.

"Please," she sneers.

"Finn, then?"

"God _no_ ," she says, distaste in her mouth, and suddenly her face in the mirror is crumbling and she's turning around and clutching at him, burying her face in his neck. "I told her I loved her," Santana is practically sobbing into his shoulder now, and Kurt is absolutely mortified. He has no idea what to do with his arms, but he brings one up to curl around Santana's back even though he doesn't quite know how to make it fit. She doesn't seem to notice.

"Wait, told her wh-- oh," he asks, and then comprehension dawns.

"Don't label me," she snaps immediately, pulling back.

"I didn't say anything!" he protests, and thinks of Blaine, and Blaine and Rachel, and Santana, and Brittany too. Before he can lose himself in the convoluted twists and turns of it all she starts speaking again. Where she was hurt before, now she is angry, and the words out of her mouth are fast and clipped and hard as they spill forth. "I told her, and she said she loves me back, but she doesn't want to be with me. And the one fucking good thing I had I lost." Dumbfounded, he struggles for something to say, but she is not done. "I used to think you were just attention-seeking," she continues, filling the silence between them herself, "until I tried to tell her and the words wouldn't fucking come, because I was too scared of what came next.

"I never realised how brave you were until you left," she finally gets out, her gaze earnest and a bit apologetic, and Kurt is speechless. He thinks back to all the times she has made jokes at his expense, both before and after Glee; to all the times she's mocked him or the things he likes, making it clear that she thinks he's little other than a prissy girl with a dick, and for an instant he wants to react to her confession with little else than mockery of his own, basal delight at the misery of a tormentor. But Kurt is the boy who has been keeping David Karofsky's secret for months now, and Santana hasn't stolen nearly as much from him as he has. He tugs her towards him and she comes unresisting. She's crying again.

"Santana," he says, wrapping his arms around her with conviction, "it's hard. But it's going to be ok."


End file.
